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JOCCH publishes papers of significant and lasting value in all areas relating to the use of ICT in support of Cultural Heritage, seeking to combine the best of computing science with real attention to any aspect of the cultural heritage sector.
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author learned little about that debate, though, receiving only a few sentences of hastily written feedback with an acceptance or rejection decision.
Today, author names are hidden from the program committee, the top conferences provide authors of all submissions detailed reviews, and there are more top conferences (for example, OSDI and NSDI) for an author to target. So authors feel emboldened to submit almost any paper to almost any conference, because acceptance will advance their research and career goals, but rejection does them virtually no harm. In fact, a new dynamic has evolved, where work is routinely submitted in rough, preliminary form under a mentality that favors a cycle of incremental improvements based on the detailed program committee feedback until the work exceeds the acceptance threshold of some PC. And often that threshold is reached before the work is fully refined. Thus, it is not uncommon to see publication of an initial paper containing a clever but poorly executed idea, a much improved follow-on paper published elsewhere, and then a series of incremental results being published. Perversely, this maximizes author visibility but harms the broader scientific enterprise.
Thus we see a confluence of factors that amplify—increasing the magnitude without adding content to a signal—the pool of submissions. Faced with huge numbers of papers, it is inevitable that the PC would grow larger, that reviewing would be done outside the core PC, or that each PC member would write reviews for only a few papers. The trend toward Web-based PCs
that don’t actually meet begins to look sensible, because it enables ever-larger sets of reviewers to be employed without having to assemble for an actual meeting. Indeed, even in the face-to-face PC model, it is not uncommon for the PC meeting to devolve into a series of subgroup discussions, with paper after paper debated by just two or three participants while 20 others read their email.
Reviews written by non-PC members, perhaps even Ph.D. students new to the field, introduce a new set of problems. What does it mean when an external revie wer checks “clear accept” if he or she has read just two or three out of 200 submissions and knows little of the prior work? The quality rating of a paper is often submerged in a sea of random numbers. Yet lacking any alternative, PCs continue to use these numbers for ranking paper quality. Moreover, because authorship by a visible researcher is difficult to hide in a blinded submission (and such an author is better off not being anonymous), work by famous authors is less likely to experience this phenomenon, amplifying a perception of PC unfairness.
Faced with the painful reality of large numbers of submissions to evaluate, PC members focus on flaws in an effort to expeditiously narrow the field of papers under consideration. Genuinely innovative papers that have issues, but could have been conditionally accepted, are all too often rejected in this climate of negativism. So the less ambitious, but well-executed work trumps what could have been the more exciting result.
Looking to the future, one might expect electronic publishing in its many manifestations to reshape conference proceedings and journal publications, with both positive and negative consequences. For example, longer papers can be easily accommodated in electronic forums, but authors who take advantage of this option may make less effort to communicate their findings efficiently. The author submits camera-ready material, reducing production delays, but the considerable value added by having a professional production and editing staff is simultaneously lost.
As the nature of research publication evolves, the community needs to con-
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